Seminario de Lingüística Teórica LyCC: "The interaction of aspect, thematic roles and eventive structure: the aspectual 'se' in Spanish"

16:30 hrs. Sala Caro Baroja 1D

 

Por Ismael Iván Teomiro (UNED) y Cristina Romero (IUIOG - UAM)

 

This talk presents work in progress, and sets out to address the Spanish so-called aspectual "se" that appears with some transitive verbs that select incremental themes like leer-leerse (read) as in “Juan se leyó un libro” vs. “Juan leyó un libro”. Previous analyses build upon the idea that "se" makes an aspectual contribution to the semantics of the predicate. We will argue in this talk that the contribution of the aspectual "se" is thematic rather than aspectual: "se" is a fully functional pronoun that is interpreted as a participant of the event due to its bearing dative Case and its being theta-marked as experiencer. The presence of this theta-marked experiencer argument triggers the expansion of the predicate by adding a caused event whose argument is the clitic. The semantic effect is the emphasis on the affectedness of the subject argument.

 

Organiza: Grupo de investigación "Lingüística y ciencia cognitiva". Línea Cambio, variación y cognición en el lenguaje.